Figure 1.

Examples of Inappropriate Image Manipulation.

(A) The gel has been cleaned up to hide a stronger band above the main band at 80 kD in the rightmost lane. Adjusting the exposure and gamma correction in the magnified view (top right) highlights a pattern of pixel “smearing,” indicated by the red arrow, that differs from the pixel pattern elsewhere in the gel image.

(B) Green fluorescent protein expression in the protoplasts appears roughly equivalent with little signal detectable in the control (left). Adjusting the exposure and contrast to the maximum across the image set (bottom), however, demonstrates that the images have not been processed identically. The first image is completely black, and the color balance between the second and third clearly differs when the backgrounds are compared.